The great hunt - By Robert Jordan Page 0,16

the bundle into the arms of the shatayan. “That’s everything.”

She tried to peer through the gap. “Are you sure? Moiraine Sedai said everything. Perhaps I had better just look—”

“It’s everything,” he growled. “On my honor!” He shouldered the door shut in her face, and heard laughter from the other side.

Muttering under his breath, he dressed hurriedly. He would not put it past any of them to find some excuse to come bulling in anyway. The gray breeches were snugger than he was used to, but still comfortable, and the shirt, with its billowy sleeves, was white enough to satisfy any goodwife in Emond’s Field on laundry day. The knee-high boots fit as if he had worn them a year. He hoped it was just a good cobbler, and not more Aes Sedai work.

All of these clothes would make a pack as big as he was. Yet, he had grown used to the comfort of clean shirts again, of not wearing the same breeches day after day until sweat and dirt made them as stiff as his boots, then wearing them still. He took his saddlebags from his chest and stuffed what he could into them, then reluctantly spread the fancy cloak out on the bed and piled a few more shirts and breeches on that. Folded with the dangerous sigil inside and tied with a cord looped so it could be slung on a shoulder, it looked not much different from the packs he had seen carried by other young men on the road.

A peal of trumpets rolled through the arrowslits, trumpets calling the fanfare from outside the walls, trumpets answering from the keep towers.

“I’ll pick out the stitching when I get a chance,” he muttered. He had seen women picking out embroidery when they had made a mistake or changed their mind on the pattern, and it did not look very hard.

The rest of the clothes—most of them, in fact—he stuffed back into the wardrobe. No need to leave evidence of flight to be found by the first person to poke a head in after he went.

Still frowning, he knelt beside his bed. The tiled platforms on which the beds rested were stoves, where a small fire damped down to burn all night could keep the bed warm through the worst night in a Shienaran winter. The nights were still cooler than he was used to this time of year, but blankets were enough for warmth now. Pulling open the firebox door, he took out a bundle he could not leave behind. He was glad Elansu had not thought anyone would keep clothes in there.

Setting the bundle atop the blankets, he untied one end and partially unfolded it. A gleeman’s cloak, turned inside out to hide the hundreds of patches that covered it, patches in every size and color imaginable. The cloak itself was sound enough; the patches were a gleeman’s badge. Had been a gleeman’s badge.

Inside nestled two hard leather cases. The larger held a harp, which he never touched. The harp was never meant for a farmer’s clumsy fingers, boy. The other, long and slim, contained the gold-and-silver chased flute he had used to earn his supper and bed more than once since leaving home. Thom Merrilin had taught him to play that flute, before the gleeman died. Rand could never touch it without remembering Thom, with his sharp blue eyes and his long white mustaches, shoving the bundled cloak into his hands and shouting for him to run. And then Thom had run himself, knives appearing magically in his hands as if he were performing, to face the Myrddraal that was coming to kill them.

With a shiver, he redid the bundle. “That’s all over with.” Thinking of the wind on the tower top, he added, “Strange things happen this close to the Blight.” He was not sure he believed it, not the way Lan had apparently meant it. In any case, even without the Amyrlin Seat, it was past time for him to be gone from Fal Dara.

Shrugging into the coat he had kept out—it was a deep, dark green, and made him think of the forests at home, Tam’s Westwood farm where he had grown up, and the Waterwood where he had learned to swim—he buckled the heron-mark sword to his waist and hung his quiver, bristling with arrows, on the other side. His unstrung bow stood propped in the corner with Mat’s and Perrin’s, the stave two hands taller than he was. He had